Songs' best moments occur when Verlaine complicates the pop formula with serious tension.

While Lerche remains a promising young songwriter, Phantom Punch doesn't quite fulfill that promise.

There's very little on Son of Evil Reindeer to perk up the ears for anyone with more than a couple Jeepster products in their Case Logic.

While Monument is probably one of their best albums, the narrative beneath their deeply carved patterns remains as elusive as ever.

Release is not Cave’s strongest record, but it’s not a bad entry point. An odds and ends compilation, it provides a clear picture of the group's evolution from free-form psych-noodling toward its more sublime and trance-inducing current incarnation.

3AM’s muted irony dulls the sparkle, leaving the cracks more visible. The album doesn’t have any disastrous lows—but it never quite surpasses that initial dopamine rush, either.

Making a Door Less Open would inevitably benefit from a willingness to risk spectacular failure—this isn’t the hard left-turn “Can’t Cool Me Down” hinted at.

Mono have wisely restrained from directly replicating their previous sound, but here the band has sacrificed sonic heaviness for intellectual ponderousness, and too often has fallen prey to slow, repetitive, tiresome songwriting patterns and a frustrating lack of variation.

s an aural analgesic, it goes down smooth and numbs what it needs to. But instead of tearing open the passageway between this world and whatever lies beyond, it shrinks that portal to the size of a keyhole.

If Eyes Open lacks the vivacity of its breakthrough predecessor, it remains an assured example of a band still paying more than lip service to the notion of rock music as a vital pop form.

Right now Sequitur feels like a step forward for a genre that could happily stay the same forever.

This is comfort music, and comfort never goes out of style. And while the aura of dreamy romantic abstraction is the same, Svanängen distinguishes himself from his peers on the structural level.

With a short history of decay, Nothing have begun to build something fresh and exciting; it’s a shame they didn’t finish clearing the rot first.

An uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.

While Seventeen Going Under excels when Fender looks inward, the intimacy is disrupted by scattered political musings.

"Holiday Call" and "Black Lion Massacre" aren't among Barnes' best songs, but they are bold and show that he's an artist who is eager to challenge himself rather than stick to what has become a very successful formula.

If Lerner just keeps on doing his thing, he's clearly getting better at it.

[Icky Blossoms] alternates between caffeinated synth-pop, nocturnal bar crawls, and straight-up electroclash revival. But even if they're working in a genre that demands an icy façade, they fortunately can't hide the enthusiasm that often defines Pressnall's main gig.

Home works as a sensual mood-setting exercise, but less so as a distinct creative statement.

What follows is 13 tracks of sometimes great, sometimes anonymous music.

When he’s not over-intellectualizing his emotions, Caesar can be disarmingly raw. If only he didn’t write like a cyborg the rest of the time.

It can be hard to square the bleakness of the lyrics with the verdant excess of the sound, though its lo-fi sonics certainly match the rawness of the emotions contained within.

Too often on Port of Miami 2, he locks into the flow of least resistance and simply lets it ride, hiding behind his production instead of asserting his dominion over it. And while his music remains sumptuous as always, that luster alone is no longer enough to wow.

Nuclear Daydream sounds placeless, as if striving for universality. At times the music sounds like it could actually achieve that lofty goal; at times it just sounds blanched, drifting into a kind of anonymity.

In the end, the ambitious misfires and pre-coffee drowsiness of A Ghost Is Born don't ruin the album entirely-- they only serve as distractions that make it much more difficult to excavate the band's strengths from the surrounding detritus.

Pattern of Excel is similarly idiosyncratic--it feels, in many ways, like a fistful of sketches torn from the notebook and tossed to the wind. Making sense of the ways they fall is part of the pleasure of this quiet, cryptic record.

Zig Zaj feels like he's straining a little too hard to make every song different from the last, where he's actually become pinned down by the "eclectic" reputation he's accrued, forcing him to make unwise decisions just to keep a certain degree of diversity afloat in his work.

The chaos comes on the very next track, “Grease in Your Hair,” one of a couple songs that performs the National’s old sleight of hand: working the anxiety around until they pull an anthem out of thin air. As a way to address one of the primary tensions in their catalog—writing songs about dissatisfaction in spite of great conventional success—it’s a great bit. But as Frankenstein moves from wrestling to reckoning, the swells are tamer.